Sustaining and scaling up: Expanding Australia’s total addressable defence workforce

The 2026 Defence Industry Development Strategy (DIDS26) recognises the challenge. It introduces workforce growth targets for large prime contractors, with a focus on apprenticeships, extends the Defence Industry Internship Program, expands the Schools Pathway Program, and commits to stronger partnerships between Defence, industry and the education sector. Broader workforce planning also looks at mid-career transitions, recognised prior learning, retraining and workers moving from adjacent industries.

These are necessary investments. But if the strategic environment requires capability at greater speed and scale, how much of our response can depend on pipelines that inherently take time to mature?

An apprentice takes years. A university student takes years. A school STEM initiative may take considerably longer. We need those pipelines because this is a generational problem. But what can industry do with the population Australia has now? Jobs and Skills Australia suggests upskilling people who already have some of the relevant skills as a short-term response to long training gaps.

Latent capability

The pathways reinforced through DIDS26 are fit for purpose for the cohorts they are designed to reach. But between them are people who left school early, became parents young, experienced disadvantage or contact with the justice system, or took jobs elsewhere because Defence never felt accessible. Some have aptitude, drive and capability, but traditional recruitment filters can screen them out before we discover it. What if someone has the aptitude to perform valuable work in defence, but lacks the credential, recognised prior learning, industry experience or career history that makes them visible as a transferable worker? That is where I think we need to start talking about latent capability.

Latent capability is not an assumption that anybody can be trained to do anything. It is the aptitude and underlying capability a person already has, combined with the trainability to acquire and apply the additional skills and knowledge a role requires.

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Can this person learn a complex process, follow procedure, work accurately, interpret information, exercise judgement, operate safely, learn technical systems, and communicate under pressure? Those capabilities may not appear on a CV, but they can tell us what that person could become capable of doing.

From current to total addressable workforce

In business, the total addressable market means everyone who could buy a product, not just those buying it today. If Australia wants a larger, more resilient sovereign defence industrial workforce, we need to increase our total addressable workforce.

Most employers operate within a current addressable workforce. We advertise a role with qualifications and experience requirements, then search for people whose employment history shows they can already do the job. The total addressable workforce extends that pool to people with transferable or latent capability who could be developed to the required standard.

Pipeline growth and workforce expansion aren’t necessarily the same thing. Long-term pipelines build tomorrow’s workforce. Expanding the addressable workforce gives us another lever for increasing capability from the population we have today.

The opportunity is to expand the aperture. A mid-career engineer from an adjacent industry brings skills and experience employers recognise. Someone who left school early and spent years in retail may have no recognised skills to transfer into Defence, but that does not tell us whether they could develop them.

Capability mapping

Governments have started mapping the workforce Defence programs will need, as the South Australian Defence Industry Workforce and Skills Report does for SSN-AUKUS and naval shipbuilding. Capability mapping goes further. What does someone need to be capable of doing in a particular role? Which capabilities are essential at entry? Which can be developed? And who has the aptitude to acquire them?

Sometimes the capability is already there, but we are looking for it under the wrong job title. Skykraft, an Australian satellite company, has looked to bicycle mechanics for satellite assembly. A bicycle mechanic is accustomed to precision assembly, repeatable processes and mechanical systems. They may never have worked in space, but some required capability already exists.

Capability mapping means identifying the capability a job requires, where aptitude and transferable capability already exist, which entry requirements are genuinely necessary, and what additional capability must be built.

This isn’t about lowering standards, pretending everyone can do highly technical work, or replacing existing pathways. It is about separating what someone needs before they can safely and effectively enter a role from what can be taught once they are there, while recognising that security, regulatory and other mandatory requirements still apply. It also means asking whether every qualification or experience requirement we recruit for is necessary to do the job.

Don’t lower the standard. Change the point at which every component of the standard has to be met.

DIDS26 offers a parallel. Defence is introducing minimum viable contracting to streamline procurement, reduce complexity and deliver capability faster. Could industry apply some of that same discipline to how it defines entry into its workforce? What is essential on day one? What can be built by day 100?

The model in practice

This is how Gunggandji Aerospace approaches workforce, and our work with Toll Aviation supporting search and rescue operations in South Australia is one practical, repeatable model.

Someone entering a complex aviation environment does not need to arrive capable of interpreting every aspect of operations. Their responsibilities can be deliberately bounded. They might start by printing the weather information for the operations team. As their capability develops, they can progress to briefing weather and then to understanding and briefing increasingly complex operational information, including airspace, freezing levels and military range configurations.

What do they need to be able to do safely on day one? What can they do at month three? Month six? Year one? The standard at the end hasn’t fallen. The entry point has changed.

That is the whole model at work. We are not moving existing capability between employers. We are creating capability that did not exist before, expanding the total addressable workforce.

Finding latent capability requires a different way of assessing people, but it needn’t be complicated. Work samples, short paid job trials, aptitude assessments, simulated scenarios and structured interviews can test what someone can do and learn, rather than what a CV already demonstrates.

It also costs something, and industry needs to accept that. Bounded entry roles need supervision, structured training and time before someone is fully productive. That is the price of expanding the workforce rather than competing for what we already have. An employer unwilling to carry it is choosing to recruit from the same current addressable workforce as everyone else.

Participation and progression

For me, Aboriginal participation demonstrates where this model can unlock capability industry is missing. This is not a participation model looking for an industry problem. it is a workforce model that can also create opportunities for people traditionally overlooked.

Jobs and Skills Australia found that occupations with greater inclusion of women, older workers, First Nations people and people with disability are far less likely to face shortages, while male-dominated roles, especially in the trades, remain persistently difficult to fill. That doesn’t prove diversity reduces shortages, but it does suggest that when an occupation draws from a narrower demographic pool, its potential labour supply is narrower too.

Getting somebody through the door is not enough. The objective must be progression towards greater capability, responsibility and career opportunity. Industry needs people to develop, not simply enter, because that is what turns workforce participation into workforce capacity. That requires industry to redesign entry points, recognise transferable skills and latent capability, and be willing to train differently.

What we can and can’t measure

There is no data telling us what Australia’s total addressable defence workforce is. That is part of the point. If we measure only people whose qualifications, occupations and experience make them visible to Defence, we cannot see the latent capability outside that pool.

Jobs and Skills Australia found that nearly half of trade roles remained in shortage in 2025, with technicians and trades workers accounting for more than half of occupations in persistent shortage between 2021 and 2025. It also distinguishes between shortages caused by too few qualified applicants and a suitability gap where applicants have qualifications but employers still identify gaps in skills or experience.

Capability mapping cannot solve every workforce shortage. Some jobs genuinely require years of formal education, technical training and experience, while others have regulatory, licensing, safety or security requirements that cannot be designed away. There is no shortcut, and nor should there be. But even there, capability mapping helps. Bounded roles can take tasks off qualified people who are in short supply, and identifying aptitude early can help decide who enters longer pipelines like apprenticeships.

That is why this model sits alongside established workforce pathways rather than replacing them. If everyone recruits from the same pool, recruitment doesn’t create additional national capability. Creating another capable worker does. That’s the difference between competing for workforce and expanding workforce.

The north

The same question becomes important in northern Australia. As Defence invests in infrastructure and capability in the north, we need to understand who will operate, maintain and sustain it, including in a mobilisation scenario. That means understanding the skills and latent capability in surrounding communities, what could be developed locally, and how quickly that workforce could expand if required.

Location is already a barrier. Jobs and Skills Australia found that in the Northern Territory, 55 per cent of employers who received few applicants said location was the reason. Recruiting people to the north is hard. Building capability among people who already live there is a different proposition.

This is where the model matters most. In much of the north, Aboriginal communities sit close to the places Defence is investing, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up more than a quarter of the Northern Territory’s population. If we are serious about building workforce capability in the north, we should ask what it would take to identify and develop latent capability within those communities. That work has to be done with communities, not to them, and on terms that make sense for the people who live there.

A workforce that already lives where the capability sits is there when it is needed, but only if we build it before it is needed. That changes the workforce question. It is no longer simply about participation or filling vacancies. It becomes a question of national capability and workforce resilience.

A different approach

If we want to increase the workforce available to Defence, industry needs to get better at recognising capability before it arrives packaged with qualifications and experience.

There are practical places to start. Primes could review entry requirements role by role against what each role actually needs on day one. Defence and industry could test capability-mapping pilots in priority roles and regions, and measure what they add to the workforce rather than who they move around it.

At Gunggandji Aerospace, this is the approach we are already applying. If your organisation is struggling to find people, the first question may not be where to find them. It may be what you are actually looking for.

The workforce Australia needs may not all look like the Defence workforce we have today. Our job is to work out who is capable of becoming part of it.

Daniel Joinbee is founder and managing director of Gunggandji Aerospace.